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Pandora says laboratory-made diamonds are forever

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Pandora says laboratory-made diamonds are forever

#401

Post by Seb-C »

alias_neo wrote: post #78
trapexit wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is kind of a lazyweb question because the "why marriage?" question has been discussed many times before on HN. https://www.google.com/search?q=marriage+site%3Anews.ycombin... Beyond the social convention that "it's the thing to do" at a certain point in a relationship, some reasons are: - Marriage provides financial assurance for a spouse who will defer their career to raise children. - Some friends and family (…

So, although the question-asker is being downvoted, your response does actually cover interesting discussion topics, and to summarise, the answer could be that the systems and conventions need to change? - I believe in the UK (where I live) one has all of the legal and financial implications automatically when a relationship reaches a certain age (3 years I believe). Legally you would be treated the same way as if yo…

> the systems and conventions need to change?

I think that in many (most?) countries nowadays, marriage is already no more than just a legal status that offers those practical points, so I am not sure if anything needs to change.

You don't have to get a ceremony/ring/party, go at the church or whatever your culture/religion associates with the act of getting married.

You can just sign the contract privately, which makes you legally married.

Same for divorce, I believe it only gets complicated when you fight about children, money and assets, otherwise you can both just decide to stop the contract.

Re: Pandora says laboratory-made diamonds are forever

#402

Post by swat535 »

GordonS wrote: post #281
vagrantJin wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Okay class, child labour, a few thousand poor people dead, terrorist groups starving hundreds of thousands, destroying schools and libraries. That is where diamonds come from. How many would still want a natural diamond because diamonds are forever?" The elephant in that lecture hall was probably the hypocrisy. I think if you still raise a hand after hearing all that, the issue isn't branding at all. It's narcissim,…

I personally fully agree, but unfortunately not everyone thinks as logically as you or I. I talked about this with my wife recently, and even though she had a vague idea of the horrors that mined diamonds bring, she'd still continue to buy/want mined diamonds. She sees mined diamonds as more "real", and finds it difficult to believe that her diamonds in particular would be part of the problem - as if it somehow would…

> I personally fully agree, but unfortunately not everyone thinks as logically as you or I.

Yes they don't because of marketing.

If we want to really change this, the narrative, the media and marketing has to change from: Earth Diamonds = Status of eternity and "foreverness" to Earth Diamonds = Status of child abuse.

With massive campaigns from media and celebrities, people can be shamed into changing their behaviour.

We need to stop treating women as children and objects to be "bought out" with diamonds and gifts. The days of women needing men to "provide" for them are long gone.

But I digress.. more to your point, just because something is a tradition, it doesn't mean we should throw our hands up and accept the status quo.

Change requires bravery.

Re: Pandora says laboratory-made diamonds are forever

#403

Post by Spivak »

ashtonkem wrote: post #304
rlv-dan wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people pay insane amount for a box copy of Super Mario Bros, a game you can play one pretty much any device. ROM dumps are literary the same data. I guess rarity is hard to set a price on. And people like being rare and unique.

Original Super Mario Bros carts are rare, diamonds are not. Natural diamonds have an artificially reduced supply thanks to a cartel, if their market actually functioned they’d be very cheap.

Natural diamonds are really cheap. You can go online right now and buy rough diamonds for $3.50/carat. Diamonds that you would want to put into a ring are much rarer and diamonds have all the qualities that jewelry enthusiasts want are rarer than that.

We need to start thinking about jewelry like hi-fi audio. If you just want to listen to good music then lord knows you don't need a $10k setup. You hit diminishing returns really fast and your untrained eye isn't gonna be able to tell the difference between a $500, $2,000, and $10,000 diamond -- they will all be pretty. But that doesn't mean that there aren't people who do notice and do care.

Re: Pandora says laboratory-made diamonds are forever

#404

Post by Seb-C »

TekMol wrote: post #15
cyberpunk wrote: post #3

Married members of HN, what did you do if you think diamonds are utterly ridiclious however due to societal constraints some kind of ring is required for your SO?

Honest question: Why marry in the first place? Why practice a personal relationship in a way others have designed? Isn't it somewhat contrary to the theme of Hacker News? To me, the term "hacking" describes the habit of doing things in a more interesting/efficient/fun way than how they are usually done.

I have friends who got married with a steampunk-cosplay ceremony/party, so a marriage can definitely be HackerNews-compatible :)

Re: Pandora says laboratory-made diamonds are forever

#405

Post by sangnoir »

klmadfejno wrote: post #377
throwawayosiu1 wrote: post #334

I'm at the marriage age right now and I see tons of my friends getting married. A friend got proposed a couple of months ago and her ring is ~40k USD. In my opinion, that's crazy since they're spending ~30k CAD on their wedding. My partner also mentioned that she'd like a wedding ring of the same calibre since according to her - diamond ring is how much love / value / worth I hold for her. Furthermore, a significant…

> My partner also mentioned that she'd like a wedding ring of the same calibre since according to her - diamond ring is how much love / value / worth I hold for her. I don't really understand situations where peoples' partners say things like this and it comes as a surprise. This feels like an extremely aggressive statement on how they view your relationship, and the level of trust and mutual understanding you have.…

Social signaling and innate competitiveness is a hell of a drug. A former all-Linux employer had standardized on issuing Dell laptops, and everything was fine. Until some joiner in middle/lower management petitioned for a Macbook Pro and got it, and a couple more popped up in the Excel-jockey stratum, and the floodgates were opened. PMs and team leads all started to report all sorts of "problems" with their old laptops (too slow, gets too hot) to motivate for replacements - thought they had to run Linux VMs to get any work done. The Dell/Apple laptops weren't just tools anymore - they were now a social signal/status symbol to say "I am an important person" in every meeting room. It was fascinating to observe, because getting a Macbook made their lives worse (having to develop in a VM with slow disk I/O - this was before docker took over the world). Computers became the visible representation of your place on the totem pole; the same thing happens with engagement rings within social circles when going for drinks/brunch. You don't want to be caught dead with the Dell of engagement rings in a room full of Macs.

> I probably wouldn't be staying with them, because it seems like it would flag a variety of other uncomfortable personality traits.

I wouldn't go that far - we all have hobbies/interests we are passionate about that we're not utilitarian about and are willing to go all-out on. Judging a person on one axis feels like a mistake to me.

Re: Pandora says laboratory-made diamonds are forever

#406

Post by washadjeffmad »

joeblau wrote: post #65

Random diamond story! As a freshman in college, I took a geology class and our teacher asked all of the women in our class to raise their hand if they would rather have natural or human-made diamonds. Most of the women (over 80%) raised their hands for natural. The reasons they gave all seemed to tie back to branding and natural diamonds being “real.” Then our teacher gave another analogy. He asked if people would ra…

I went through this not that many years ago buying a ring for my SO. My biggest mistake was including her in the decision.

She described what she wanted exactly– nothing gaudy or ostentatious, just a singular, tasteful stone on a plain band. Couldn't be simpler, could it?

Finding stones that met her criteria was easy. Some were natural diamonds, some lab grown, many moissanite. From the outset, she said the meaning of the ring was what was most important and that she didn't want to pick it out herself (after effectively picking it out herself). We'd talked about moissanite a lot over the years, and she'd approved of the idea, and the same with lab grown diamonds. We're college educated adults with backgrounds in the sciences, so we weren't on uneven footing with comprehension.

When I showed her what I'd picked out, it quickly devolved into a lot of uncharacteristic tears and shouting. It took a few more tries, and then she explained. Apparently a lab grown diamond meant my love for her was also artificial, a budgeted ersatz stand-in for the real thing, and me saying we could spend more on a larger stone or matching set further belied my ignorance. No, she wanted me to have picked out an allegory for our love: a "perfect" diamond. She then sent me the details of the stone she actually wanted.

After a little "wait, where's this coming from and why did you let me spend weeks searching if there was only one right answer", I ended up spending twice our decided budget on a "natural" diamond with the same characteristics as the lab grown (except the diamond's clarity was lower, because lab grown clarity is always perfect), which wasn't any object, but now the ring is marred by the memories of arguments, and she doesn't really love it. Lesson learned.

I don't know what kind of spell the diamond people cast on otherwise reasonable women to make them able to reduce the totality of a life and experiences shared together into a single crystalline bet, but they need to package it and sell it to the military.

Re: Pandora says laboratory-made diamonds are forever

#407

Post by jliptzin »

washadjeffmad wrote: post #406
joeblau wrote: post #65

Random diamond story! As a freshman in college, I took a geology class and our teacher asked all of the women in our class to raise their hand if they would rather have natural or human-made diamonds. Most of the women (over 80%) raised their hands for natural. The reasons they gave all seemed to tie back to branding and natural diamonds being “real.” Then our teacher gave another analogy. He asked if people would ra…

I went through this not that many years ago buying a ring for my SO. My biggest mistake was including her in the decision. She described what she wanted exactly– nothing gaudy or ostentatious, just a singular, tasteful stone on a plain band. Couldn't be simpler, could it? Finding stones that met her criteria was easy. Some were natural diamonds, some lab grown, many moissanite. From the outset, she said the meaning o…

I sincerely wish you good luck in your marriage, you’re going to need it.

Re: Pandora says laboratory-made diamonds are forever

#408

Post by lastofthemojito »

kqr wrote: post #292
GordonS wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally fully agree, but unfortunately not everyone thinks as logically as you or I. I talked about this with my wife recently, and even though she had a vague idea of the horrors that mined diamonds bring, she'd still continue to buy/want mined diamonds. She sees mined diamonds as more "real", and finds it difficult to believe that her diamonds in particular would be part of the problem - as if it somehow would…

There's also a common line of reasoning that roughly goes "well this particular diamond has obviously already been mined, so no additional harm is caused by me wanting it." Obviously you and I see that even that line of reasoning alone jacks up demand for an awful business, but not all people have the capacity to reason that abstractly about how their behaviour plays a part in a very big aggregate. ---- My wife did g…

That's interesting - when I bought an engagement ring for my wife the one and only jewelry store I went to was happy to order me a bare ring, give me the size range of diamonds that would fit it, and then install the 3 synthetic diamonds I ordered from Gemesis. It seemed like installing diamonds that folks already owned into new rings was something they did relatively often. Maybe you'd have better luck approaching it that way - "I already have a diamond, what rings can you sell me that would fit it?" rather than "source me a synthetic diamond and put it in a ring for me".

Although it looks like Gemesis, the company I bought the synthetic diamonds from, has pivoted and rebranded as Pure Grown Diamonds, and sells wholesale rather than retail now.

Re: Pandora says laboratory-made diamonds are forever

#409

Post by tonyedgecombe »

dagw wrote: post #254
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Positive, the more you spend the more likely divorce.

The more you spent, the richer both of you are. The richer both of you are, the easier it is to afford getting divorced.

Possibly although that would be fairly easy to filter out in a study.

Re: Pandora says laboratory-made diamonds are forever

#410

Post by fisherjeff »

jliptzin wrote: post #407
washadjeffmad wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went through this not that many years ago buying a ring for my SO. My biggest mistake was including her in the decision. She described what she wanted exactly– nothing gaudy or ostentatious, just a singular, tasteful stone on a plain band. Couldn't be simpler, could it? Finding stones that met her criteria was easy. Some were natural diamonds, some lab grown, many moissanite. From the outset, she said the meaning o…

I sincerely wish you good luck in your marriage, you’re going to need it.

That seems a little harsh? Even people in the best marriages sometimes have emotional, irrational disagreements
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